Liberian Women and Political Resistance: Family Influences and Collective Organizing

Abstract

Fatigued and enraged by 14 years of political conflict rife with violence targeting women and children, Liberian women formed a transnational network of peace activists that ended civil war in their home in 2003. Numerous grassroots organizations, market women, legal aid workers, and women’s rights advocates developed spaces to address multilevel consequences from the war, both leading to and after the peace movement. This ethnographic case study documents the narratives of three activists who engaged in grassroots or formal political spaces that ensured and contributed to peacebuilding in Liberia. I also consulted a key informant who remained in Liberia throughout the conflict and observed the evolution of women’s collective efforts towards sociopolitical change during and after the war. Adding to the literature on movements led by women of African descent in response to political conflict, findings from this study attend to the role of family in activists’ stories of war and resistance. The study reveals that key relationships, multigenerational principles embraced, war-related impacts on their broader family systems, formal and informal supports, as well as family-level social and economic circumstances were salient in their reports. This dissertation also details the development processes, collective identities, and strategies employed in the mass action that coalesced for peace in 2003, while disentangling the mass movement into three distinctive spaces and sites of resistance. Results from this study increase specificity and attention to Liberian women’s collective labor while radically committing to peace at the nation-state level by resisting the social order imposed by war, division, and Liberia’s gendered political arenas. The study has implications on continued attention to the role of families in social change, as well as strategies to resist political structures that perpetuate conflict and violence against women and children in similar contexts around the world.